The Urban Horizons Apartments

Building Beautiful Homes and Sustainable Development

WHEDCO believes that physically beautiful environments play an important role in making people healthy and productive. When WHEDCO renovated the abandoned Morrisania Hospital, creating an apartment complex for low-income people, we insisted on high aesthetic standards. Features such as wall sconces, high ceilings, and decorative flooring patterns added quality and character cost-effectively. Indirect and natural lighting, pilasters and chair rails in the corridors, and reconstruction of the vaulted entry loggia lent dignity to the public spaces. Design features such as solid hardwood cabinets and tile backsplashes in the kitchens contributed warmth and quality to the apartments, while reducing maintenance costs. Attractive pendant lights, garden statuary and the fully restored terracotta detailing, cornices, and window arches gave the building a grandeur that is unique among community development initiatives.

Our standards are based on the belief that, like everyone, residents of low-income housing deserve to live in surroundings that are not only safe, but also uplifting. By adding value to our building, we made an investment in its residents and in the surrounding community, sending a message to all who passed by or through our doors that the South Bronx can be a place that people are proud to call home.

Urban Horizons is comprised of 132 units of low-income permanent housing (48 reserved for formerly homeless families) in our restored neo-Renaissance building. Tenants have access to Urban Horizons' programs and receive special attention from our Family Support staff (such as ESL classes), but are otherwise independent of the operation of the economic development center.

Since opening in May 1997, Urban Horizons has been fully rented, and has received awards from the American Planning Association/US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, the Municipal Art Society, the Fannie Mae Foundation, and the National Civic League.